


Conversations (containing a threat...or maybe two)

by thelongcon (rainer76)



Category: Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Merle POV - spoilers up to 3x10, Missing Scene, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-14
Updated: 2013-03-14
Packaged: 2017-12-05 06:33:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/719960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainer76/pseuds/thelongcon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>You talked a big game, but you were never there for me<em></em></em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Conversations (containing a threat...or maybe two)

**Author's Note:**

> Extreme Warnings - this fic is written from Merle Dixon's point of view - as such, the content goes hand in hand with his character - beware of racism, homophobia, physical abuse, explicit language and a slightly warped relationship with Daryl - also be aware none of this reflects my personal opinion, it's just an attempt at character writing.
> 
> Set in the past, and in and around the events of 3x10, after the Governor attacks the prison.

His brother used to be a pretty boy when he was young – not so much any more – some of those good looks were knocked out of him when a member of the Dixie Mafia took a wrench to Daryl’s eye-socket, shattering the right cheekbone into tiny fragments.  He was about nineteen at the time and Merle remembered one side of his brother’s face was a Halloween mask of blood and ivory bone.  Twenty years later and Daryl ain’t so pretty - rough at the edges from hard drinking, lately, even harder living – with his hair in his eyes and clothing full of stink.

It’s on all of them.

They’ve been sprayed with enough zombie guts, gore, that they can’t wash the fragrance out, engrained in their clothing, splattered on their skin; none of them are pin-up material, they smell like they’re rotting from the inside out.

Used to be those good looks were a concern for Merle.  Seven years older than his baby brother and Merle weren’t blind to the attention Daryl drew – from girls and boys alike - and weren’t that a kicker?  Weren’t that enough to make Merle’s blood boil?  It was up to Merle to teach him to be a man, how to take a fist or a boot to the gut, to go down swinging, a competition if you will but instead of ‘first up the hill’ it was how many licks he could get in before Merle took him down aggressively.  _You’re bigger,_ Daryl would spit, lip bloody as he staggered to his feet. 

 _Pansy ass little shit_ , Merle would sneer.  _That all you got?  You think anyone’s gonna care if you’re smaller or weaker, Darylina?  Get off your faggotty ass and go again, before I do you **real** damage, boy._

They fought like alley cats in the dust and Merle didn’t give a damn how many times he drew blood – how many baby teeth he knocked loose - so long as Daryl wouldn’t quit.  Everything between them was a competition, everything.  It was Merle doing his best to teach Daryl what his father couldn’t be fucked doing: how to fight and how to _hate_ and how to know, right down to his dirty soul, that there weren’t anybody in his quarter.   If any prick got close to his baby brother - with his strange looks and alley-cat wariness - then Merle could sleep sound, knowing Daryl would knee-cap the fucker and hamstring ‘em for life.

It was his duty, y’all see, because the hard knocks don’t stop; whining about it marks you as a victim, and Merle wasn’t a victim.  Daryl sure as shit wasn’t going to grow up to become one either.

He took Daryl to a whore-house when he was fourteen, sat outside the door with one leg thrown over the arm-rest, hollering tunes at full volume while Daryl lost his cherry on the other side of the  walls.  Merle snorted his first line of china white in that house, and five years later, when Merle was well and truly hooked, late on repayments and hiding low, the Dixie Mafia took it out on his baby-brother instead.  Three against one and Daryl didn’t quit, kept breathing, fighting, swining, using every trick Merle ever taught him, but his face was never symmetrical again.

Merle was twenty-six at the time, an addict, not a penny to his name.  He joined the army, left those debts behind. Merle stayed around long enough to be sure Daryl made it out of the hospital, then left for Basic; blowing shit up and killing things and coming back a bona-fide hero for it.

When he came home from Iraq, Merle stayed clean Stateside for almost three solid months before he swapped his old china white habit for oxy-con.  He fell in hard with a group of bikies, ex-military riff-raff who traded in drugs and weapon’s-smuggling, found a home on his brother’s rat-shit couch.  Merle brought a sweet Bonneville 650, hunted around for Triumph parts and rebuilt the bike from the ground up, remodelling the engine and painting it gun-metal black, the SS insignia emblazoned on the tank.  Daryl had watched; long legs kicked out in front of him, sitting on the porch step with a beer in hand.  “You KKK?  Gone all Master race on me now?”

“You’re like a fucking prophet,” Merle had grinned.  “That’s me, master of my own sweet domain, including you, baby-brother, including you.”

“Here was, the only thing I thought you mastered was free-loading off my fucking couch.”

“Well, there _is_ the fucking, I’ll grant you.  Be sure to wash those covers, Darylina.”

Daryl had flipped him off.  He knocked the ash off his cigarette, eyes half-closed against the sun, body a lean sprawl across the porch steps, appearances aside he wasn’t relaxed, Daryl never truly relaxed.  Merle had wiped the paint off on his hands, smearing his denim black, and took a seat beside him.  “I’ll introduce you to the boys, later, they could use another enforcer.”

“Have a job.”

“This one pays better.”  Merle cuffed him over the ear.  “Quit arguing, princess.  I haven’t led you astray yet.”

Daryl had looked at him, sidelong, cigarette dangling from one corner of his mouth, voice dry.  “That so, Mr. KKK?”

“You know it, son.”

Merle weren’t kidding about the girls, or the state of the couch, he’d bring them home drunk as a skunk.  He’d let those twinks ride him like cowgirls, bare-ass naked, grinding against the cushions, his hands resting on their thighs or tweaking their titties.  He’d time it especially for three or four in the afternoon, knowing Daryl could walk through the doorway at any moment.  Merle would bite his lip bloody to draw it out, until he could hear the engine of the truck roar up the driveway, his balls tightening and dick twitching as Daryl’s footsteps neared. 

The very first time, Daryl froze in the doorway like a stunned elk, the next time, he cursed up a storm and threw a cushion at Merle's head.  The third time, he stalked forward, stopped at the couch and grabbed that girl by the hair, tugged her head back, bent her spine in a perfect arc of poetry, and kissed her soft as molasses while Merle thrust into her and lost it, hips stuttering erratically. Daryl pulled away, wandered toward the fridge to grab a cold one; he stared at his brother for a full minute, sipping that beer quietly, eye’s agate, then disappeared outside again.  He went hunting.  Didn’t come back for three days.  He never did join Merle’s bikie gang; he kept his truck, his current piss-poor and no good job.

Merle had lain on the couch, dick soft and swinging in the breeze, his skin flushed, so dizzy he couldn’t see straight.  Thing about Daryl is, he doesn’t bring home girls or guys either, seems content with his own two hands and Merle hasn’t seen him fuck anyone since he was fourteen.  “You limp-dick or somethun?  They bust your balls the same day they busted your eye?”

“You’re asking now?”

Merle didn’t hang around after the beating, sure as hell couldn’t repay the mafia, but so what?  “I’m sorry, princess, was there a time-limit on my brotherly concern?”

“The line of questioning clocked out years ago.”

Merle shrugged.  “Whatever.  I can get you something, there are other ways of flying high.  You need a stash?  A hit of something?” 

A stash was the first thing Merle went to save when the apocalypse hit – that and his bike – the first thing Daryl went to save was Merle.  His baby-brother found him blowing off heads in the bikie gang headquarters; Merle ruined half of the shit he came to steal with the blood splatter, but no matter.

“Come on!” Daryl had hollered, one hand tight in Merle’s collar, and jerked him out of the building while the dead lurched and floundered.

Merle had been laughing, blood and gore all around him, alert, high on the massacre.  Better than a whore or any crack, killing everything in sight with Daryl tight at his side.  “This is what we were made for!”  Merle had whooped, wild as a coyote.  “We were made for this shit, man!”

 

****

 

 

It’s Daryl who rides the Triumph now and Merle wants to snap at him.  “Gone all master race on me, bro?”

Like all symbols in this world, it don’t mean much of anything these days

Too few of them left, humanity hunted to near extinction, and those fine prejudices Merle used to draw upon were rendered obsolete.  Daryl rode the bike because it was the only thing he had that belonged to his brother – and Merle stares at him, jaw clenched – and wandered what, if anything, he had left of Daryl that belonged to him.   He can’t believe his brother stayed with these assholes, the Sherriff who handcuffed Merle to a rooftop, he can’t believe his loyalty – the one thing Merle counted on as belonging exclusively to _him_ \-  is fucking askew.

That ain’t his brother, sidling with the law – oh, he’s still dangerous – Merle made sure of that, sat back on the Yellow Jacket bridge so he could see his brother work.  Watched Daryl take out that mob of Walker’s, who were jonesing to dine on infant, just to reassure himself he still could, that he wasn’t a pansy-ass since the last time they spoke.  Daryl ain’t lost the edge, or his agility in a fight, but his lost some of the hot-headedness, the recklessness Merle cultivated and never out-grew. 

The feral joy when blood was spilt.  Excited as a hyena at the smell of it.

“How many times you point that gun at my brother’s head?”  Merle asks the Sherriff casually, and picks his teeth clean with a nail, making a show of it.

They’ve locked him in a cell.  Merle had listened to the shouting between the china man and his brother for almost a full hour before Rick showed up, his face lined with shadows, expression bisected by the bars that separated them.  Everything has fallen peaceful now and Merle doesn’t know where the group, where his brother, went - outside maybe, dealing with the Walkers on the outer perimeter, or trying to fix their busted gate. 

“More times than I care to count,” Rick admits.  He’s lost his hat and badge at some stage, his weapon of choice, the Colt Python, Magnum 347 looks like a bloody canon at his side.  His eyes are dead, his tone dismissive.  “To be honest, he deserved it.  Your brother was a bona fide shit.”

And you’re still a prick, Merle thinks. 

He should have killed Rick on that rooftop when he had the chance, when he knocked the Sherriff onto his pompous ass with a single right hook. It used to be, Daryl was a good-looking kid, the type of good looks that would make Merle fly into a rage every time some creep looked at his brother wrong.  Now a days he ain’t so much (good looking, that is)  – but there’s still something about Daryl – something _arresting_  if you want to be high and mighty with your choice of words, and there’s something in the way Rick looks at his baby brother, _relies_ on him, that makes Merle see red.  “Didn’t handcuff my brother to no pipe-line, I hope?” he asks with a smile, with a squint.  His stump aches with sense memory, his free hand curls into a claw.   

In his mind’s eye he can see himself fucking a whore on his brother’s couch, and Daryl moving closer, smooth as liquid water.  Merle jerked off to that memory a thousand times since they were separated, but the memory’s being usurped, over-run with different images, of handcuffs, badges, of guns - of stuttering uncertainty - and the way Daryl had kissed. 

“No,” Rick interrupts.  “Even when he was a bona fide shit Daryl was better quality than the likes of you.”

“Don’t sound like much of an apology to me.  Daryl said you were sorry, that you came looking for me after I hacked my own goddamn hand off.”

Rick steps forward, closer to the bars, his teeth show, white as a cannibal’s.  “Do I look like I’m overfilled with empathy?”

“No,” Merle agrees, and glances at Rick’s gun, at the way the man holds himself coiled tight, ready to snap at the slightest provocation.  “But don’t tell me you came here alone so I can die a mysterious death in a cellblock prison?  My brother’s a dumb fuck, but even him can see through a ruse like that.”

The daylight catches in Rick’s eyes, makes them flash like bottled lightning. 

“You make a move on _any_ of my people and I will gut you.  You step within ten feet of Maggie, Beth, or Carol and the same rules apply, except it will be Glenn with the knife in his hand.  You’re here on your brother’s grace.  But know this; I won’t hesitate to shoot you.  I might even smile when I do it.”

“You think that will fly with Daryl?  My blood on your hands?” Merle shifts restlessly, presses up against the bars.  “You’ll loose him for good if you do.”

“I think Daryl got over you once before.  I think he’s a better man because of it.  If I see him slipping…” Rick shrugs, one hand on the butt of his weapon.  “...it ain’t no hardship.  We do what we have to do to protect each other, and he's worth more to me than you.”

Merle breathes out, short and sharp, dizzy with fury. “Take me hunting one day then, lawman, we’ll see who comes back.”

“Played that game once before, Merle, wouldn’t you know it?” Rick smiles, slow, sharp as a blade slicing through flesh.  “I won.”


End file.
